[Arvon]

A small but growing number of people in strife-torn Pakistan deal with their woes by smoking scorpions, according to a November Reuters dispatch from Quetta. Users dry the scorpion's stingers, grind them up, light the powder, and suck in the smoke. "When I smoke scorpion," said Ghulam Raza, "then the heroin is like nothing to me." Quetta addicts tend to hang out at a local cemetery, where outsiders will not bother them (though there is an occasional problem with enstupored persons falling into partially dug graves). [Yahoo-Reuters, 11-7-01]

A 33-year-old man was taken to Via Christi Regional Medical Center in Wichita, Kan., on Nov. 13 with a coat hanger stuck in his throat, but there was a logical explanation, he told the hospital staff. At a party, "someone," he said, had slipped a dime-sized balloon containing what he heard was cocaine into his drink, and after accidentally ingesting it and feeling it stick in his throat, he decided to try to fish it out with the coat hanger. Surgeons unhooked the hanger, but police recovered the bag, and prosecutors said they would probably file a felony drug possession charge against the man. [Wichita Eagle, 11-20-01, 11-14-01]

Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation told a Society for Neuroscience meeting in November in San Diego that their study had found that muscles were strengthened 35 percent and 13 percent, respectively, among two groups of people who merely concentrated on imagining they were exercising (vs. no increase at all by control groups that neither exercised nor imagined exercise). [Yahoo-Reuters, 11-12-01]


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Breakthroughs in Artificial Body Parts
In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved the artificial Neosphincter, a prescription-required, pump-operated device to give relief for otherwise-hopelessly incontinent people; although the device recorded too many "adverse incidents" in trials to be marketed to the general population, it claimed a 90 percent success rate for patients specially trained in its use. And in October, Toronto cosmetic surgeon Robert Stubbs, who has a thriving practice in silicone testicle implants for men missing one or both, told the Edmonton Journal that he can now offer special implants for fully testicled men who merely want bigger ones. [Yahoo News-Reuters, 8-17-01] [Edmonton Journal, 10-9-01]

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The Litigious Society

Dionne French filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Mexico in October over a 1998 incident, charging the Santa Fe Southern Railway and a conductor and brakeman with negligence in not stopping a train in time to avoid hitting her. French, who was homeless at the time and living near Santa Fe, admitted that she was lying on the tracks asleep, and with a brown blanket over her, but said the railroad still had the obligation to detect her presence and stop. [The New Mexican, 10-18-01]

It Actually Happens: Dorothy M. Ellis Williams filed a lawsuit in July against the QuikTrip gas station in Edwardsville, Ill., for injuries to her back and knee when she slipped on a banana peel while walking out the front door. [Belleville News-Democrat, 7-13-01]

Scott Bender filed a lawsuit against U.S. Airways in October, charging that a crew on a February flight from North Carolina had closed up the plane that was parked at a gate in Birmingham, Ala., and left him sleeping in his seat. Bender said he deserves some money from the airline because when he woke up, it was pitch black, and he thought for a few seconds that he was dead. [Birmingham News, 10-4-01]


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